4 ms·
Lets go over the numbers shall we ? "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire
by thewarrior 5y ago
Lets go over the numbers shall we ?
"Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic.
Carbon capture [0]
1. We take 5 billion cubic meters of Oil out of the ground
2. We emit 30 billion tons of CO2
3. We can only capture from big sources like power plants and industrial sources - Maybe about 40 % of Co2 can be captured
4. Half of the capturable CO2 is about 6 billion tons of gas
5. We will have to liquefy it so it has to go into the ground.
6. We have to shove 12 billion cubic meters of Co2 into the ground every year to sequester only half of the capturable CO2 however the scale of this is greater than the entire Oil industry that was created over 100 years and cost trillions in capital.
7. After this you're still only capturing a fraction of the carbon. You'll have to pay heavy taxes on everything you buy.
8. Who is going to live next to these billions of tons of C02 in the ground ? This will leak and kill people.
Electric cars [1]
1. The global vehicle fleet is estimated at 1.4 billion vehicles travelling 28 trillion kilometers
2. Powering this is estimated to require an *additional* 17k Terawatt hours of carbon free power generation. The current global generation of electricity is 26k Terawatt hours.
Phasing out fossil fuels from power generation entirely
3. The author estimates that we need to build 165k new power plants that are a mix of solar, wind, hydro and nuclear. This while most of the worlds existing infrastructure is crumbling.
4. We need 200k storage stations that can store 100 MWh to act as backup for solar / wind. This will need 90 million tonnes of batteries.
5. If you want to replace the Gas used for heating as well and go completely zero fossil fuel the estimate becomes - 6 million storage stations and 2 billion tonnes of batteries.
6. The entire known reserves of Nickel, Lithium, Cobalt are not enough to make these many batteries. We need another 7 Australian Lithium deposits.
India and China continue to rapidly increase their emissions. Poorer nations cannot stop they are too poor to even begin.
[0] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SIjlZQf28I - Vaclav Smil
[1] - https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025 https://youtu.be/n_gvvj56rzw?t=2025
- stnmtn 5y agoThis is incredible sobering. What can we do in the face of this?
- FreeSpeech 5y agoRealise our predictions are fallible: https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park-2020-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2020/01/08/us/glaciers-national-park...
- srajabi 5y agoIt's quite cost effective to do something like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injection https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... Or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
- ncmncm 5y agoEmbarking on these would bring us a disaster far beyond anything we are facing now.
- ArkanExplorer 5y agoThe solutions to climate change are not technical, they are political. Call politicians, protest, raise funds, join a party, become a politician yourself. With just a $20 carbon tax we basically end coal, which is about 40% of our global emissions: https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-various-fuel-prices-under-a-carbon-tax/ https://www.resources.org/common-resources/calculating-vario... At $50 we end natural gas, at $100 we end oil.
- thewarrior 5y agoThere are some answers but you’d probably get downvoted in places like this for even suggesting them.
- elsonrodriguez 5y agoIt's not a story the Jedi would tell you.
- Gravityloss 5y agoAverage world electricity consumption is about 3 TW or 3000 average sized 1 GW nuclear power plants. One could build a hundred factories building 200 MW modular reactors, one per day each, meaning the problem is solved in... 150 days. It is indeed a large scale problem. One can still look at projects like the 20,000 B-24 Liberator bombers produced in USA during the second world war. That is a staggering achievement. https://www.airplanes-online.com/b24-liberator-production-assembly-plants.htm https://www.airplanes-online.com/b24-liberator-production-as...
- glogla 5y ago> "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic. > Average world electricity consumption is about 3 TW or 3000 average sized 1 GW nuclear power plants. That makes it sound like GP is several orders of magnitud wrong. Throws the rest of the post into question as well.
- generativenoise 5y agoThe 3 per day per the article is for 1ZJ which is an estimate of total energy consumption, not just replacing the electrical grid.
- Manuel_D 5y ago> "Just build nuclear" - As per the post itself, we need to build 3 nuclear plants every day until 2050 to replace the entire grid with nuclear. Yeah not realistic. France averaged building one nuclear power plant every 100 days during the Messemer plan. Far from 3 per day, but France only makes up slightly less than 1% of the population. Similarly, in the US if we built nuclear plants at the same rate as we did during the 1970s we would have 100% nuclear and hydroelectric electricity generation on that timeframe. There is historical precedence for this pace of nuclear plant construction. As far as the alternatives, it's the most viable approach, short of a miraculous breakthrough in storage technology, fusion, or similar.